Startling
Discoveries:
The Biography of Robert Arthur, Jr., the Creator
of the Three Investigators Series

Why call this section
Startling Discoveries? Because for almost thirty years now, misinformation
about Robert Arthur’s life has been spreading through the world, starting
with errors made in reference works, errors which have been replicated
almost endlessly. One such error appeared in a catalogue which listed
science fiction and fantasy stories, and which attributed five of Robert
Arthur’s stories to Ray Bradbury. This led to the erroneous conclusion
on the part of some bibliographers that Robert Arthur was, of all things,
a pseudonym of Ray Bradbury.

But the major error,
which was replicated over and over again, involved the conflation of Robert
Arthur’s life with the life of an entirely different man, Robert Feder,
whose middle name happened to be Arthur and who was sometimes listed as
“Robert Arthur Feder”. Similar dates of birth and death compounded the
problem, and up until now, few bibliographers have wondered at the obvious
inconsistencies in The Robert Arthur Feder story, like the fact that when
Robert Arthur, Jr. was living in Yorktown Heights, New York, Robert Feder
was living in Los Angeles.

These bibliographers
also did not appear to be troubled or puzzled by the fact that Robert
Feder was a movie producer who was hard at work in Hollywood at the same
time that Robert Arthur was working in New York on his radio show The
Mysterious Traveler. For one man to have accomplished all that the mythical
Robert Arthur (Feder) was said to have done would have involved feats
of extraordinary prestidigitation, and would also have required that this
mythical man work at least twenty-seven hours a day. From our point of
view, the worst result of the error was that the extraordinary body of
work Robert Arthur produced in his lifetime was gradually forced, in most
reference works, to take a back seat the movie productions of Robert Feder
-- since such reference works had limited space available.

Well, as Jupiter Jones
says in The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, “People are very
unobservant. Even eyewitnesses to an occurrence often contradict themselves.”
In fact, probably the creator of Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob
Andrews would not have been particularly surprised at the confusion and
misinformation about his life and work, since after all, that was why
he went looking for The Three Investigators in the first place -- because
he knew that the world could use a lot more people who were capable of
accurately observing, analyzing and deducing. Still, it is certainly time
to set the record straight, so herewith is the true and accurate biography
of Robert Arthur Jr. Please feel free to pass it on to any biographers
or bibliographers who are in need of accurate information, Consider yourself
deputized, as of now!

Robert Arthur as a college student.

ROBERT
ARTHUR, JR. the creator of ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND THE THREE INVESTIGATORS
(now known as THE THREE INVESTIGATORS) was born on November 10, 1909, at
Fort Mills, Corregidor Island, the Philippines, where his father, Robert
Arthur, Sr..., then a lieutenant in the United States Army, was stationed.
Robert Arthur Sr... graduated from West Point in the class of 1907, and
shortly afterwards was stationed in New Orleans where he met Robert Arthur’s
mother, Sarah Abbey Fee. They were married shortly before Robert Arthur
Sr... was posted to the Philippines.

Because of his father’s
profession, Robert Arthur’s childhood was spent moving. From 1911-1915
he lived in Fort Monroe, Virginia, from 1915-1919 in Fort Andrews, Massachusetts,
and from 1919-1924 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his father was a Professor
of Military Science and Tactics in the University of Michigan’s ROTC program.
In 1924, Arthur’s family was back at Fort Monroe , and from 1924-1925
at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, then from 1925-1929 at Fort Monroe again.
He and his brother John Arthur, who was born in 1914 and later became
a career army officer, were educated in the public schools of Hull, Massachusetts,
Ann Arbor, Michigan, Leavenworth, Kansas, and Hampton, Virginia, and it
was in Hampton Virginia that Robert Arthur attended high school, and was
elected President of the senior class.

Then, although Arthur was offered scholarships
to both West Point and Annapolis, he turned them down, because by the
time he was in high school, he already had his heart set on being a writer,
and indeed, he published his first story while he was attending Hampton
High School. In 1926 Robert Arthur enrolled at William and Mary College
in Williamsburg, Virginia. Two years later, he transferred to the University
of Michigan in Ann Arbor, from which he graduated in 1930 with a B.A.
in English with Distinction. After working as an editor at one of the
Munsey Publications, he returned to the University of Michigan where he
received his M.A. in Journalism in 1932. He then moved to New York City,
where he lived in Greenwich Village in a walk-up apartment at 123 Waverly
Place.

During this time, Arthur
began writing stories for publication in the pulp magazines which flourished
at that time. In those days, a first-class pulp writer could make four
and sometimes five cents a word, so Arthur was able to support himself
in New York during the Depression. Between his graduation from Michigan
in 1930 and 1940, his stories were published in Wonder Stories, Detective
Fiction Weekly, Mystery, The Illustrated Detective Magazine, Street &
Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, Amazing Stories, The Shadow, Street
& Smith Mystery Reader, Detective Tales, Thrilling Detective, Double
Detective, Startling Stories, Collier’s, The Phantom Detective, Argosy
Weekly, Unknown Worlds, and Black Mask.

In addition, during
this time, Arthur worked as a writer and editor for pulp western, fact
detective, and screen magazines for Dell Publishing, and was associate
editor of Photo-Story, a picture magazine published by Fawcett
Publications. More significantly, he conceived and edited Pocket Detective
Magazine for Street and Smith, the first pocket-sized, all-fiction
magazine, in which several of his stories were published. In February
1938, he married Susan Smith Cleaveland, a radio soap opera actress from
whom he was divorced in 1940. In 1940, he took a class in radio writing
from Eric Barnknow at Columbia University, and it was in this class that
he met David Kogan, with whom he decided to partner in radio writing.

Arthur and Kogan began
to write and produce together in the early 1940’s, during which time --
from 1942 until 1944 -- Arthur was also Copy Editor and later Head Writer
for Parade, the national literary supplement. As Head Writer, he
was in charge of many of the major text pieces; he also accompanied photographers
on photo shoots, wrote stories from research, and originated story ideas.
Between 1940 and 1943, his stories appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly,
Weird Tales, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Detective Fiction
Weekly, Detective Tales, Comet Stories, Unknown Worlds, Short Stories
Inc., Asteroid, Astounding Science Fiction, Detective Tales, Detective
Novels Magazine, MacLean’s Magazine, Household Magazine, The Elks Magazine,
Astounding Science-Fiction, and Astonishing Stories, Sir!, Baffling Detective
Mysteries, Dime Mystery, and Detective Story Magazine.

Then, from 1944 until
1952, Arthur, with Kogan, was a producer-director for the Mutual Broadcasting
System, for which he and Kogan co-wrote and produced many shows for Dark
Destiny, and also their own show, The Mysterious Traveler,
which was re-aired as Adventure Into Fear, and syndicated among
radio stations by Harry S. Goodman Productions. During the time The
Mysterious Traveler was aired, it ranked at the top of all shows heard
over the Mutual Broadcasting System, consistently outranking CBS and NBC
shows broadcast at the same time. In a report from the Research Department
of WOR Radio dated July 31, 1950, The Mysterious Traveler was ranked
first out of the sixteen most popular shows on radio. Robert Arthur and
David Kogan were awarded the Edgar for Best Mystery Radio Show of the
Year by the Mystery Writers of America.

Previous to this, while enrolled in a
class taught at Columbia University by Whit Burnett, the editor of Story
Magazine, Robert Arthur had met Joan Vaczek, a fiction writer and
the daughter of a Hungarian diplomat. Arthur and Vaczek were married in
December of 1946, and moved to a house on Croton Lake Road, facing the
Croton Reservoir, in Yorktown Heights, New York, where they lived until
1959. They had two children, Robert Andrew Arthur in 1948, and Elizabeth
Ann Arthur in 1953. Elizabeth Arthur, like her parents, is a writer of
fiction and non-fiction. While living in Yorktown Heights with his wife
and family, Robert Arthur continued to write short stories, and publish
them in the pulps, and from 1946 to 1948 he was also the managing editor
of the Waverly Publishing Company. From 1948 to 1951 he produced Dark
Destiny, a dramatic TV series. After 1952,he worked as a co-producer
for the radio show Mystery Time.

In 1953, because of
Arthur’s involvement, and the involvement of his partner David Kogan,
in the Radio Writer’s Guild, The Mysterious Traveler was abruptly
canceled. WOR and the Mutual Broadcasting System, during the McCarthy
era, believed that the Radio Writer’s Guild was leading writers, in the
words of Kogan, “down the path to Moscow.” Robert Arthur’s era as a writer
for radio came to an end. Before it ended, however, he wrote and produced
over five hundred radio scripts for his two shows as well as for other
shows such as The Shadow and Nick Carter. In 1959, Robert
Arthur and Joan Vaczek were divorced, and it was at this time that Arthur
moved to Hollywood where he lived for almost three years, working in television.
He wrote scripts for The Twilight Zone, and he worked as a story
editor and script writer for Alfred Hitchcock’s TV show, Alfred Hitchcock
Presents.

In 1962, Arthur moved
back from Hollywood to Cape May, New Jersey, where he lived with his father’s
aunt Margaret Fisher Arthur, until his death in 1969. Because of his association
with Hitchcock, Arthur was, during this period, approached by Random House
to edit a series of literary anthologies which would capitalize on Hitchcock’s
popularity. Arthur, drawing on his knowledge of the fields of mystery
and suspense -- as well as his knowledge of the pulp magazines in which
so many of the classic stories first appeared -- put together a number
of Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies which included Alfred Hitchcock
Presents: Stories For Late At Night, (1961); Alfred Hitchcock Presents:
Stories My Mother Never Told Me, (1963); Alfred Hitchcock Presents:
Stories Not For The Nervous, (1965); Alfred Hitchcock Presents:
Stories That Scared Even Me, (1967); Alfred Hitchcock Presents:
Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do On TV, (1968). For each of these,
Arthur wrote the “Hitchcock” introduction.

Simultaneously,
Arthur was involved in editing a series of anthologies for younger readers:
Alfred Hitchcock’s Haunted Houseful, (1961); Alfred Hitchcock’s
Ghostly Gallery, (1962); Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum,
(1965); Alfred Hitchcock’s Sinister Spies, (1966); and Alfred
Hitchcock’s Spellbinders in Suspense, (1967).He also edited,
under his own name, Davy Jones Haunted Locker, (1965); Spies
and More Spies, (1967); and Thrillers and More Thrillers,(1968).
Collections of Arthur’s own short stories were brought out by Random House
as Ghosts and More Ghosts published in 1963 and Mystery and
More Mystery, published in 1966. The success of these anthologies
led Robert Arthur to suggest to Walter Retan, an editor at Random House,
a new children’s book series which would use Hitchcock’s name. The
Secret of Terror Castle was published in 1964, and the rest, as they
say, is history.

From 1964 until his death
Arthur wrote two Three Investigator titles a year, working with Walter
Retan. The books quickly became an international success. In 1968, in
failing heath, Arthur decided it was time to bring other authors into
the now successful series. He contacted Dennis Lynds, who wrote the first
non-Arthur-authored Three Investigators title, The Mystery of the Moaning
Cave, published in 1968 under the pseudonym William Arden. Jenny Fanelli
took over as series editor on the last book Arthur wrote, which was
The Mystery of the Talking Skull (# 11). This was the only book on
which she and Arthur worked together, but after Arthur’s death, Fanelliworked until her retirement from Random House in the early 1990’s
with -- most notably -- Dennis Lynds, who wrote thirteen Three Investigators
books, M.V. Carey (Mary Carey) who wrote fourteen Three Investigators
books, Marc Brandel, who wrote three Three Investigators books, and Kin
Platt, who wrote two books under the pseudonym Nick West.

It wasn’t until well
after Robert Arthur’s death that “Alfred Hitchcock” was dropped from the
title of The Three Investigators in new books in the series, and Hitchcock
was removed as an ancillary character, replaced with a fictitious Hollywood-type
named Hector Sebastian. When Jenny Fanelli retired from Random House,
The Three Investigators series was effectively terminated in America,
although it continued on in Germany, where there are currently at least
84 books in the series. Titles # 57 (Tatort Zirkus, 1993) to #
84 (Musik des Teufels, 1998) are German language originals. Walter
Retan, the series original editor, died in 1998 in New York. In 1998,
Random House began, slowly, reissuing Three Investigators titles.

Robert Arthur died in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 2, 1969, at the age of fifty-nine.
Because of his early death, Robert Arthur was unable to prevent errors
about his life and work from making their way, over the last thirty years,
into numerous reference works.

For accurate biographies of
the four other main writers of The Three Investigators books, please find
the Contemporary Authors entries for Dennis Lynds , Mary Carey, Kinn Platt
and Marc Brandel, at www.galenet.com.